The Tennessee Historical Commission, which manages the state's participation in the National Register program, reports that 80 percent of the state's area has been surveyed for historic buildings. Surveys for archaeological sites have been less extensive; coverage is estimated less than 5 percent of the state. Not all properties that have been determined to be eligible for National Register are listed.[1]

The locations of National Register properties and districts (at least for all showing latitude and longitude coordinates below), may be seen in an online map by clicking on "Map of all coordinates".[2]

The following are approximate tallies of current listings by county. These counts are based on entries in the National Register Information Database as of April 24, 2008[4] and new weekly listings posted since then on the National Register of Historic Places web site.[5] There are frequent additions to the listings and occasional delistings and the counts here are approximate and not official. New entries are added to the official Register on a weekly basis.[6] Also, the counts in this table exclude boundary increase and decrease listings which only modify the area covered by an existing property or district, although carrying a separate National Register reference number.

The Tennessee county with the largest number of National Register listings is Davidson County, site of the state capital, Nashville.

^The latitude and longitude information provided in this table was derived originally from the National Register Information System, which has been found to be fairly accurate for about 99% of listings. For about 1% of NRIS original coordinates, experience has shown that one or both coordinates are typos or otherwise extremely far off; some corrections may have been made. A more subtle problem causes many locations to be off by up to 150 yards, depending on location in the country: most NRIS coordinates were derived from tracing out latitude and longitudes off of USGS topographical quadrant maps created under the North American Datum of 1927, which differs from the current, highly accurate WGS84 GPS system used by most on-line maps. Chicago is about right, but NRIS longitudes in Washington are higher by about 4.5 seconds, and are lower by about 2.0 seconds in Maine. Latitudes differ by about 1.0 second in Florida. Some locations in this table may have been corrected to current GPS standards.